The Great War: four devastating years told by twenty eyewitnesses. There are many books on the First World War, but award-winning and bestselling historian Peter Englund takes a daring and stunning new approach. Describing the experiences of twenty ordinary people from around the world, all now unknown, he explores the everyday aspects of war: not only the tragedy and horror, but also the absurdity, monotony and even beauty. Two of these twenty will perish, two will become prisoners of war, two will become celebrated heroes and two others end up as physical wrecks. One of them go mad, another will never hear a shot fired. Following soldiers and sailors, nurses and government workers from Britain, Russia and Germany, and from Australia and South America - and in theatres of war often neglected by major histories on the period - Englund reconstructs their feelings, impressions, experiences and moods. This is a piece of anti-history: it brings this epoch-making event back to its smallest component, the individual.

Review: -"'Reviews for his books on Battle of Poltava: 'The most outstanding brilliant military history I've ever read' (Telegraph) 
-'The best depiction of war I've ever read' (Simon Sebag Montefiore)" 


Author Biography: Peter Englund is an award-winning, bestselling Swedish historian. Having been a professor at Uppsala University, in 2008 he was appointed the new Permanent Secretary of Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. His breakthrough book on the Battle of Poltava was published to universal critical acclaim and sold over 250,000 copies in Sweden alone.                                            

Our world is governed by the numbers generated by the accounts of nations and corporations. We depend on these numbers to direct our governments, our institutions, corporations, economies, societies. But where did they come from and how did they become so powerful? The answer to these questions begins in the Dark Ages in northern Italy with a new form of record keeping perfected by the merchants of Venice called double-entry bookkeeping. The story of double entry stars a Renaissance monk, mathematician, magician and constant companion of Leonardo da Vinci, his 27-page treatise for merchants, renaissances in art and mathematics, and revolutions in communications and industry. The rise and metamorphosis of double-entry bookkeeping is one of history's best-kept secrets and one of its most important untold tales. Why? First, because it made possible the wealth and cultural efflorescence that was the Renaissance. Second, because it enabled capitalism to flourish, so changing the economies of the world forever. Third, because over several centuries it grew into a sophisticated system of numbers which in the twenty-first century governs the global economy. And finally, and most significantly, because today bookkeeping has the potential to make or break the planet.

Author Biography: Jane Gleeson-White is the author of Classics and Australian Classics.                                            

       In this companion volume of Thomas Keneally's widely acclaimed history of the Australian people, the vast range of characters who have formed our national story are brought vividly to life. Immigrants and Aboriginal resistance figures, bushrangers and pastoralists, working men and pioneering women, artists and hard-nosed radicals, politicians and soldiers all populate this richly drawn portrait of a vibrant land on the cusp of nationhood and social maturity. From the 1860s to the great rifts wrought by World War I, an era commenced in which Australians pursued glimmering visions of equity in a promised land. It was a time of social experiment and reform, of industrial radicalism and women's rights. We were a society the world had much to learn from, or so we believed. But as much as we espoused we were a special people and celebrated a larrikin anti-authoritarianism, we retained provincial objectives that saw ultimate respect for society's structures. There was no Australian revolution. With a rich assortment of contradictory, inspiring and surprising characters, Tom Keneally brings to life the people of a young and cocky nation. This is truly a new history of Australia, by an author of outstanding literary skill and experience, and whose own humanity permeates every page.

Author Biography: Thomas Keneally is the author of the history of Irish convictism, titled The Great Shame. His later work, The Commonwealth of Thieves, looked upon the penal origins of Australia in a way which sought to make the reader feel close to the experience of individual Aboriginals, convicts and officials. His novels include Bring Larks and Heroes, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, Schindler's Ark and The People's Train. He has the won the Miles Franklin Award, the Booker Prize, the Los Angeles Book Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Prize, and the Scripter Award of the University of Southern California.                                            

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia's greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December, 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After five weeks, tragedy struck. Ninnis was swallowed whole by a snow-covered crevasse, and Mawson and Mertz realised it was too dangerous to go on. With the scant food and provisions they had left, turning back was almost equally perilous. Their dwindling supplies forced them to kill their dogs to feed the other dogs, at first, and then themselves. Hunger, sickness and despair eventually got the better of Mertz, and he succumbed to madness and then to death. Mawson found himself all alone, 160 miles from safety, with next to no food. Peter FitzSimons tells the staggering tale of Mawson's survival, despite all the odds, arriving back just in time to see his rescue ship disappearing over the horizon. He also masterfully interweaves the stories of the other giants from the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration - Scott of the Antarctic, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen - to bring the jaw-dropping events of this bygone era dazzlingly back to life.

She created the look of the modern woman; she was the high priestess of couture; she inspired women to take off their bone corsets and to cut their hair. She believed in simplicity and elegance and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric; elevated the waistline and created bellbottom trousers, trench coats, turtleneck sweaters, and costume jewelry. In the 1920s when she employed more than two thousand people in her work rooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire. She was autocratic; a volatile woman of fierce ambition and drive; confidante of the rich and famous, friend of royalty and nobility. At the start of the Second World War, she closed down her couture house and went across the street to live at the Ritz . Picasso, her friend, called her "the most sensible women in Europe." She remained at the Ritz and moved on to Vichy and then Switzerland between 1945 to1954. For more than half a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor; mystery and myth... Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of these years. Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive expose--part suspense thriller, part wartime portrait--fully pieces together the hidden years of Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of the war. Vaughan tells the story of Chanel's long-whispered collaboration with Hitler's high-ranking officials.

Nobody is more disturbed, said President Truman, three days after the destruction of Nagasaki in 1945, 'over the use of the atomic bombs than I am, but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour and their murder of our prisoners of war.

Winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2011. Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It lead to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Daily Express Review: 'A masterpiece of historical investigation into one of the world's greatest crimes' New Statesman 'It is hard to exaggerate the achievement of this book in proving that Mao caused the famine ... only thanks to brilliant scholarship such as this will the heirs of the vanished millions finally learn what happened to their ancestors' Sunday Times 'The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read' Jung Chang 'Gripping ... Prof Dikotter's painstaking analysis of the archives shows Mao's regime resulted in the greatest "man-made famine" the world has ever seen'

 One of the most celebrated art critics and cultural commentators turns his attention to the timelessly fascinating city of Rome. In this magisterial history, Robert Hughes identifies seven distinct cultural episodes: the city's Etruscan beginnings, Julius Caesar and the birth of the Imperium, primitive Christianity and the growth of the Church, the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Neo-Classic, the Rome of Fascism and Mussolini and, finally, the Rome of the 1960s - the era of Fellini, la dolce vita and the birth of the paparazzo.The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western world.

To mark and celebrate 25 years, Belvoir Street Theatre has commissioned this stunning new book full of essays, memories and vivid photographs. This is 25 Belvoir Street.
Including a collection of essays by Robert Cousins, Ralph Myers, Robert McFarlane, Rhoda Roberts, James Waites, Alan John, Rita Kalnejais, Benedict Andrews and Neil Armfield, 25 Belvoir Street traces the social and political background from which Belvoir emerged and it looks at the way the building itself has found a way into our imaginations.
From its first mercurial decade when it teetered on the edge of oblivion on more than one occasion, through to the appointment of Neil Armfield as Artistic Director, and beyond to a new generation of theatre makers headed by Ralph Myers, this book provides an extraordinary and intimate record of a company that has been described simply as the “heart and soul of Australian theatre.